THT/James is right. Of the four “core”, the one least likely to sustain their strong years of 2009 is Posada, followed by Petttitte.

The leading indicator on Posada, aside from his position/age, is that his K/BB ratio started to deteriorate last year, a sign that he was cheating more to catch up with the FB, in my opinion.

There’s no doubt in my mind Cervelli has to catch 50 games in 2010 as ol’ Jug Ears continues to show his age. And he should be preparing to step to the background for 2011 for Cervelli/Montero/Romine or the extreme long shot in Joe Mauer.

Follow up point to the above: saying that someone will “improve” is sufficiently vague. James’s 2010 prediction for Young is .245/.326/.463, up from .212/.311/.400. An OPS of .711 going up to .745 and Chris Young still sucks.

I’m very curious to see how close to the mark James’s predictions are. I’m also curious to know what constitutes “sustain[abillity] and improvement” in 2010 for guys like Chris B. Young and B.J. Upton. How valuable a statistic is this when he predicts that Young and Upton might sustain their horrific numbers in 2010? I mean, do we need a stat to tell us that both will continue to disappoint in 2010?

I’m all for advanced metrics but I think this particular stat is just noise. Chris B. Young has raw skill but generally sucks at baseball because he can’t figure out how to hit anything but a fastball. Having James tell us that he thinks Young is the 2nd most likely batter to sustain his level of ineptitude isn’t really adding much to the statistical record.